Saturday Snippet: They Took No Human Captives

This excerpt is from my last year's Grandma's Wedding Quilts series book Kizzie's Kisses. In this year’s Lockets & Lace series book, Otto's Offer, I mention the attack by hostile Indians on Salina. Here is part of the scene that describes this actual historical event:

Kizzie reached forward to pat Sugarcone’s neck, a gesture she hoped her young mare would recognize as a thank you. She could sense Sugarcone’s heavy breathing, also. Kizzie had been pushing them both at a dead run ever since she left the family’s farm a few miles east of Salina.

Kizzie involuntarily shuddered as the thought of the danger facing her family along with the rest of the inhabitants of Salina once again skittered through her brain. A rider had raced up to their home to warn them that Indians were attacking the inhabitants to the west of Salina and leaving few, if any, survivors. The men they killed and scalped. The children they pinned to the earth with arrows after dispatching them. As for the women, as the rider had glanced at Kizzie and her mother, Jemima, he cleared his throat and merely said the women were “outraged” before they were killed. Kizzie was not naïve; she had a pretty good idea what constituted an outrage against the women.

This war party was on the move and taking no human captives, only horses. They were moving from the homesteads on the western-most outreaches of Saline County east towards the town of Salina itself. Those who lived west of the town now fled towards Salina, hoping the grouping of crude buildings could afford them some protection. But, the rider who had reached the Atwell farm advised Jemima, better known as Mima, to flee east to Junction City. Since that town was just west of Fort Riley, they had a better chance of protection there.

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Saturday Snippet: If They Want the Other Kind of Woman...

The following is from my second book in my Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series. A Resurrected Heart is about "Resurrection Day" in Lundy, California in April, 1884. It has nothing to do with the resurrection associated with Easter.

Beth shook her head. When she first started serving the miners who had wintered over, it had taken a few sharply-spoken words on her part and a few slashes through the air by Gus with his meat cleaver to convince the men that Beth was a respectable widow who worked as a cook only. Only once since being in Lundy had she felt the need to pull her father’s old hunting knife from the sheath she kept strapped to the calf of her leg with its tip tucked into the top of her boot. So far, she had not needed to pull from her pocket her double-barrel Derringer to persuade the men to keep their hands to themselves and watch what they said around her.

But, an entirely new group of miners were pouring into town. Many were good family men who left their wives and children in towns like Bodie or Carson City in order to find top-paying work in the mines. Others were drifters and trouble-makers who saw the mines as a means to build up a cache in order to move on to someplace more exciting. She wondered with this new bunch how long she would need to stand her ground in order to convince the men that she expected to be treated like the respectable widow she was. If they wanted the other kind of women, the kind that out-numbered the wives, daughters and other decent women in town, the Arcade was not the place for them. Like her late husband, they needed to go two blocks down towards the lake past China Charley’s and over a block or two.

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Saturday Snippet: Chicken-Scratching

Here is a snippet from The Bavarian Jeweler about Wilhelm's welcome to America. Please keep in mind, in 1850 when Wilhelm emigrated, the German states were not yet unified into one nation. Just as some of my immigrant ancestors insisted on the U.S. Federal Census forms their country of origin was Prussia, not Germany, Wilhelm would have considered himself a citizen of Bavaria.

          The man snarled a response. “I’ll talk how I durn well please, and y’all won’t say no different about it unless all y’all want to get back on that there ship and sail back where y’all come from. So, y’all are German?”

          “No. Bavaria.”

          The man sighed in frustration. “Durn foreigners. Spell it out so I can write it.”

          “I write. To me the paper give.”

          “Gotta to be readable. The chicken-scratch some of y’all foreigners call writing is—well—chicken-scratching.”

          Wilhelm could not understand what scratching chickens had to do with him entering America. He stretched to his full height. “You no like people not Americans, why here you work?” Ignoring the man’s glare, he continued to argue with him. The clerk finally allowed him to fill out the form himself. 

 

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